Kickended by Silvio Lorusso is online database artwork archiving the Kickstarted campaigns that got not even a single penny. This competitive aesthetics of failure has been able to attract the attention of major national newspapers (from the British “The Guardian” to the Italian “Corriere della Sera”).

Graphic Constellations: Visual Poetry and the Properties of Space, it’s an exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the First International Exhibition of Concrete, Kinetic and Phonic Poetry held in Cambridge in late 1964. Curated by Bronac Ferran and Will Hill at the Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge, UK (Image: ‘Poemkon=D=4=Open=Apollinaire’).

The Pirate Bay computers and servers have been seized by Swedish Police on a data center in Nacka (Greater Stockholm). It’s offline since December 9. http://torrentfreak.com/swedish-police-raid-the-pirate-bay-site-offline-141209/

“Art Post-Internet” was an exhibition curated by Karen Archey and Robin Peckham for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in spring 2014. This is the specially designed pdf catalogue whose with the front page is created each time with the IP and quite approximated location of the user. It includes tentatively definition of “post-internet” by Cory Arcangel, Simon Denny, and Bunny Rogers, art critics Ben Davis and Paddy Johnson, academics Mark Tribe and Esther Choi, and museum professionals Christiane Paul, Raffael Dörig, Jamillah James, Ben Vickers, Omar Kholeif and Gene McHugh.

ASPECT – Volume 14: Middle East

dvd, VOL 14, FALL 2009, U.S.A., English
This is the usual excellent selection by Aspect (a bi-annual video-magazine on dvd) on a topic tough to explore: the Middle East. The format is usual: a collection of videos in a double version: the original work and one commented on by a renowned critic. Carefully avoiding stereotypes, focusing just on the hottest areas, and mostly including famous artists (since most of them live in Europe and US) the works included render an outstanding and accomplished perspective. Moreover each work is not simply commenting on a symbolic situation of an extremely complex area, but they are most of the time breaking into it and then unrolling its paradoxical “normality”. The diversity is also reflected in the different media used (video, installation, computer animation), mostly exploiting ductile digital tools. The commentaries are an integral part, as in previous Aspect issues, but in this case they are even more so. In fact, contextualizing the singular works in their social and political environment is indispensable to fully understand and enjoy them. Violence, as is often the case in works from the Middle East, is present but rarely visible or sublimated in various forms. So the relationship between emergence and normality, violence and apparent peace is always present. And the feeling after experiencing all the works is not of anger or resignation but of a new informed awareness of different artist, skillfully using media to foster their personal vision and share their mediated tension.